"Planning"

Also, the Insider has learned the club is planning to look at a left back, where United lacks depth.

Christ! "Planning" to look? Now that the regular season is less than a month away?

Left back was one of the weakest spots on the roster as far as incumbent starters, had its depth removed in December (Burch gone via Re-Entry draft), and has been consistently identified by United punditry writ large as one of the two gaping holes in the roster for months.

Wow...

As impressed as I've been (in theory -- we'll see how things pan out in practice when the season gets under way) with the changes and additions United has made this off-season, I can't help but feel hugely let down by the FO here.

5 comments:

United has been plugging away at acquiring forwards, and with Salihi did a good job. Then they had to mollify De Ro and figure out the budget. They seem to have everything else more or less under control (save a stadium) and now they're throwing all their attention into leftback. At least they haven't given up. There have been years where we hardly filled the starting quota, and not well.

My problem, and, I think, FB's, is that they're not, in actuality, filling the starting quota at left back. They spent the transfer window pretending they had. This is not a new need, and they made it worse by releasing Burchie (I recognize there's legitimate debate on which turd is better, though I do side with the notion that Burch's aroma is more pleasing).

FB, when I saw the post title I was really hoping that you were referring to MLS "planning" to focus more attention on on-field violent crime. Because, y'know, that topic's entertaining, while this topic is...I don't know, I can't quite come up with the word, but it involves hemlock.

Well, getting Heaps to retire was step one in that direction. Unfortunately, they've let him out of the broadcast booth, thus sparing him from doing violence to our eardrums and sanity, but unfortunately putting him in charge of molding a fresh cadre of elbow-merchants.

On a more serious note: can we agree that most of the thuggishness is just guys making up for not reading the game well by throwing themselves about? The piss-poor quality and lack of consistency among the Whistlemen aside, I think we just need a general improvement in the American player's (and referee's!) sense of the game before the brutality begins to level out. That's going to come via time and experience for everybody on the field (not just the guys with the whistles) and not courtesy of some heavy-handed punishment-merchants obsessively clicking their buttons on their VCRs.

Isn't MLS's constant lip-service to improving the officiating and mitigating the violence approaching the same sort of ... Hemlockalypse? ... that discussions of the braintrust's continuing incompetence are?

With the exception of teams coached by Steve Nicol, I absolutely agree that the problem is more carelessness than thuggishness. I am certain that your omission of the exception was a mere oversight.

In the same vein as my opening, I'm sorry that the Rev's karmic comeuppance so badly did in Taylor Twellman (into whose name I inserted two gerunds, one of them diving and the other not nice, between his MLS signing and his retirement, but I've reinstated him to beloved Terpdom now, choosing to overlook his MLS career).

I personally think the whistlestuff is more cartoonishly entertaining than United's FO incompetence (or dastardy, as some conspiracy theorists like my BFF BDR would hint). But yeah, that's an aesthetic judgment and a reflection of my periodic lack of a sense of humor about United's foibles. Especially South American ones.

Agreed that forward had to be Job #1, but left back was such an obvious, glaring weakness that it seems strange they would address depth (at the very least) at nearly every position prior to pursuing one.

Granted, I've never been sold on Woolard, but even if the FO and Olsen trust Woolard as their starter, surely they should have been entertaining trialists before now?

That's where the worry lies. Given all of the positive-seeming moves that have been happening that suggest a master-plan on the part of the brain trust, it's disconcerting to find that they've neglected what surely should have been a major box to check this offseason. Kinda makes you wonder just how well thought out the rest of the operation is.

Remember the last time they went and splurged so heavily? The Great Sudamericano Invasion of 2008? That worked out well, didn't it?